Can Celibacy Unlock Heightened Levels of Pleasure?

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03-06-2025

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What if abstaining from sex and romance wasn't a retreat from intimacy but a pathway to deeper self-knowledge, creative clarity, and radical autonomy? In The Dry Season, writer Melissa Febos chronicles a year of intentional celibacy—an experiment that began in the wreckage of a devastating breakup and transformed into a radical reclamation of self. What started as a 90-day pause from sex and dating in 2016 extended into a full year of disentanglement from romantic attachment. But rather than deprivation, Febos discovered joy, clarity, and sensual fulfillment on her own terms. Her celibacy was not an escape but a deep inquiry into desire, intimacy, and autonomy—a way to interrogate how socialized narratives of love and devotion had shaped her identity as a queer woman.
Abstaining from romance didn't mean denying pleasure—it meant redefining it. Through solitude, Febos reconnected with neglected friendships, deepened her creative life, and uncovered new modes of intimacy outside the bounds of romance or sex. Using what she describes as a '12-step-style inventory' of her romantic past, she traced how her relationships had often been marked by performance, self-erasure, and dependence.
Far from isolating, her celibate year became rich with connection. Seeking models beyond the cultural obsession with coupledom, Febos turned to a lineage of women who embraced solitude as a source of power, from 11th-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen and the beguines of medieval Europe to 20th-century icons like Virginia Woolf and Octavia Butler. These figures served as both companions and intellectual ancestors, helping her situate her experience within a feminist tradition of resistance to conformity and the marriage-industrial complex.
A memoirist by trade, Febos has previously written about sex, gender, and power through the lens of her own life. In 2010, she published Whip Smart, about her three and a half years working as a dominatrix, while 2021's Girlhood, a collection of essays about the pressures and societal conditioning females face, which remains a best-seller.
Ahead of The Dry Season's release, Bazaar spoke with Febos about how celibacy reshaped her relationship to self-expression, attention, pleasure, and artistic purpose. Ultimately, the memoir asks readers to consider what our lives might look like if we stopped orienting them around the desire to be desired.
From the age of 15 into my early 30s, I'd been in nonstop committed monogamous partnerships. I had a story about myself that I was a romantic, that I was a very passionate person; I just fell in love a lot. But in my early 30s, I got into a relationship that I think is safe to characterize as addicting. At that point, I had been sober for 10 years, but I experienced depths of addiction in that relationship that were worse than anything I'd ever experienced when I was a heroin addict. It was very obsessive. I was crying all the time. I lost friends. I crashed my car. My health suffered, and when the relationship finally ended, I looked around and I thought, Damn, I feel like I should be better at this, having been doing it for so long. How did I get here?
So I thought, okay, let me take stock and see what's actually going on here, because this was the most painful experience of my life, and I would not like to repeat it. So, I started with 90 days celibate. That was laughable to some of my friends, but it was a familiar unit of time; 90 days is seen as a good metric for how long it takes to let go of a habit and see your situation more clearly. But it was also as long as I could imagine going. My [version of] abstinence included no sex, no dating, no flirting, no sexually charged friendships. And three months was a pretty radical length of time in the context of my life up until that point.
It took a minute for me to figure out what celibacy was. In the first few weeks, I definitely had some flirtations and got some texts and was like, Wait a minute, this feeling inside me that's releasing these delicious brain chemicals and making me want to keep doing whatever it is I'm doing is actually the thing I need to stay away from.
I had to redraw the contours of what my definition of celibacy was, but once I did that, it was not very hard; almost immediately, I was so much happier. My life got better instantly. All my other relationships started to flourish. I had vastly underestimated the amount of time and energy I had been devoting to these romantic pursuits for my entire adult life, and when I recouped that time and energy for myself, I got to spend it on every other passion that I had. I was having long, fun, languorous conversations on the phone with my friends. I was visiting family. I was writing more. I was exercising more. I donated a bunch of clothes, got a haircut, hit all my deadlines, taught better classes than I had been before. It really felt like I got infused attention and energy into every other area of my life, and I started having a great time. at
I had much more emotional capacity. I had this joke when I was spending that time celibate where I started saying to my friends, 'Yeah, I'm making celibacy hot again,' which is really corny and kind of embarrassing but also was very true. I think our culture suffers from an obsession with categories. We consider our sex life and our home life and our work life as separate, but they're not; we're the same person in all of those parts of our lives, and they're deeply intertwined.
I had designated sex and love as the area where I experienced some sensual pleasures of being human and living in a body, and it's where I had also located emotional intimacy. And when I sort of shut down that category, those experiences started to surface in so many other areas of my life. I had erotic experiences eating watermelon that summer that I was celibate; I had incredibly romantic experiences with dear friends of mine that were not sexual but that had a similar quality. I realized that I had been dramatically limiting myself and narrowing the aperture of my own experiences by only looking for the erotic or the sublime in lovers, when actually there were opportunities for it everywhere I looked.
I also went dancing more that year than any other year of my life. I started an email list of all my friends, and every weekend, I was like, 'Who's coming dancing with me?' We would go dancing until, like, two in the morning. I also had a really fun time exploring and redefining my relationship to food and clothes. I had identified as a high femme for most of my adult life, and I had almost every day since my late teens. And during my celibacy, I started wearing sneakers all the time, and the clothes I was wearing suddenly started to change and get more comfortable and weirder. I had no idea how much my personal style was actually defined based on the imagined gaze of strangers or potential lovers or how I might appeal to the other instead of myself. And in the absence of that, I was actually trying to repel the gaze of others.
After the first few weeks [of celibacy], I started to understand how deeply entrenched and embedded in my consciousness the issues in my relationship to love and sex were, and if I really wanted long-term change, I had to take a more active role in it. For me, because I had a lot of experience [with the] 12-step [program] and because I love making lists, I thought, okay, let me start by really taking stock and seeing what I've actually been up to. It was becoming clear to me that the story I had about myself and relationships was probably not true, because there was a common denominator among them all, and it was me. If I was the romantic, devoted partner that I had always thought myself to be, why was I bottoming out in such an ugly way? And why were all my relationships ending on similar grounds?
So I started making a list of everyone I had ever been in a relationship with: major crushes, entanglements, one-night stands, everybody. I was looking for patterns, and they very quickly emerged.
I found when I really committed to an honest accounting of my own behavior and relationships, it started to become really clear to me that I hadn't been honest with my partners and that, in fact, the behavior that I've characterized as devoted and self-sacrificing and accommodating of other people had actually been a form of manipulation.
My project of celibacy had almost everything to do with the emotional part of it. The sexual symptoms that I wanted to change were consequences of the emotional dynamics more than anything else. Not having sex with other people for a year was not very hard. There were only a couple of times where I felt tempted and I clicked back into my old operating system, but for the most part, I was incredibly relieved to set down those preoccupations and all of the energy and the inner conflicts that I experienced around them. The emotional part of it was a lot harder. Making a conscious decision to change your own orientation to a part of life for which we have really, really strong cultural stories is challenging. If I'm honest, a huge part of that work has happened since my celibacy. It wasn't until I engaged in relationships with other people that the rubber really hit the road, and I got to learn how to actually practice those things. My marriage has been the greatest education of putting ideals into practice, and I got really lucky to have a good collaborator in that. The emotional rewards of doing that work has made it entirely worth it, and nothing has brought me closer to other people.
I started doing research during my celibate year because once I was celibate for a while and I started to change my ideal for who I wanted to be in relationships, I realized that I needed some new role models. Before that, I had looked to women who had been artistically fulfilled but had also been really messy and chaotic in their love lives, like me. I wanted to find some people whose behavior, not just in their romantic lives but in their lives, was really aligned with what they believed. I wanted my actions and my beliefs to be more congruent.
I started by reading about women who were voluntarily celibate, and almost immediately I got deeply obsessed with a lot of nuns and spiritual ladies, especially those living in medieval times, like Hildegard von Bingen, who was a naturalist and a politician and an artist and wrote a language for her nuns to speak. This lady was tied to the Catholic Church, and she lived in a stone room for 35 years and managed to do all of that after she got out. I also became super obsessed with the set of religious laywomen called the Belgian beguines, who flourished in Europe in the 13th century. They lived in separatist communes and were financially independent and made art, wrote poetry, preached; they did a lot of service in their communities. They worked as nurses and teachers and performed last rites for the dying. It was unheard of at the time for women to be living that independently. It was actually illegal in multiple ways. And eventually, a lot of the beguines were burned as heretics. At a time when it's so easy to feel discouraged by the erosion of civil rights in our country and other countries, I am so grateful to have the touch of these women who were living against the grain and leading these incredibly brave, self-actualized, joyful, fulfilled lives at a time when their lives were in danger because of it. If they could do it in the Middle Ages, I can muster the gumption today to enjoy so many of the freedoms that they didn't.
After the first three months, I extended it, and then I extended it again, and when I got past the nine month mark, I was so happy and so disinclined to re enter that world that I stopped counting. I just thought, I am deeply uninterested in being in a relationship with another person. But shortly after the year mark, I started corresponding with a woman who would become my wife. Our communication didn't start as flirtation. We had read each other's work and became friends out of a sense of mutual artistic admiration. When we met, it was instant chemistry. I thought, Okay, I want to pursue this, but I want to do it really differently. I communicated that to her right off the bat, and she was like, that sounds really cool. We've been together ever since.
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